Electronic Mail (email) is commonplace in today's business environment. Many businesses run largely on email and are dependant on the effectiveness of email for achieving business goals. A typical email system comprises an email server responsible for handling the email of a plurality of user accounts and an email client used by a user to effectuate many email related tasks such as composing, sending, receiving and reading emails. Such email systems are well known in the art, examples of email servers include Microsoft® Exchange, Webmail, Novell® GroupWise® and Lotus® Domino®; examples of email clients include Microsoft® Outlook®, Webmail and Lotus® Notes®.
It is a well known feature of such email systems for a user to enable an auto-reply feature. An auto-reply feature provides for an email server to automatically send a reply email in response to a received email on a user's behalf. In this manner, while a user is not checking their email, a brief auto-reply email is sent in response to any emails received for the user so that the sender of the received email is notified of the inability of the user to respond. The auto-reply is sent from an email server allowing the user to power-off or otherwise disconnect their email client while away. The user is able to specify the text of the auto-reply email and is typically of the general form:
“Thank you for your email. Please note that I will be out of the office until 5 January. I will respond to your email at that time.”
Prior to commencing a period of not checking their email, a user typically enables the auto-reply feature by, for example, using an automatic response setup application of a desktop or internet based email client to turn on the auto-reply feature. Examples of such setup applications include the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft® Outlook® and Vacation Response in Webmail. Each of these setup applications configures the email server responsible for handling the user's email to monitor and auto-reply to emails received for the user. Once the auto-reply feature has been enabled for the user, the email server automatically replies to all emails received for the user in the specified manner without input from the user.
Certain email systems allow limited customization of the specified auto-reply message.
For example Webmail allows a user to specify two auto-reply messages; a first auto-reply message to be sent as a default auto-reply and a second auto-reply message to be sent to all messages which were sent from a sender whose email address matches a certain domain (ie. All messages received from senders whose email address is from @company.com).
As another example, Microsoft® Outlook® allows a user to specify an unbounded number of auto-reply messages. Each of the auto-reply messages can be specified to be sent based on the properties of a received message. For example, if a user receives an email from a first sender a first auto-reply message is used to generate the auto-reply and if a user receives an email from a second sender a second auto-reply message is used. This may require the user to set up a separate auto-reply message for each person the user expects to receive an email from.
There also exist software applications known as auto responders. One example of such a software application is PromaSoft AutoResponder. AutoResponder runs on a user's computer and automatically replies to internet emails (POP, IMAP for example) based on configured options. One feature provided by AutoResponder is to enable a user to personalize an auto-reply message based on a specific string from a received message's message header. Such a string is of the general form:
From: “Joe Blo”<jblo@company.com>
AutoResponder is configured to parse this string in order to extract the portion or a sub-portion of the string indicative of the user's name. The extracted portion or sub-portion is included in the auto-reply message to customize the message. One issue which exists with this solution is that the sender's name (“Joe Blo” for example) may be specified by the sender apart from their email message. It is not uncommon for a user, or a user's IT department, to put something other than their name in this field, for example, their initials, or their names inverted (“Blo, Joe” for example). In such situations, an auto-reply may not be personalized properly as it may be difficult to determine which portion of the string “Blo, Joe” should be used in an auto-reply message.
Another method for personalizing auto-reply messages is disclosed in US Patent Application 2005/0066005 (the '005 application), filed 18 Sep. 2003, naming Gary B. Paul as inventor and entitled “Intelligent Email Detection and Auto Reply Email Technique”. The technique disclosed in the '005 application requires an initial, pre-formatted message to be received from a sender, the pre-formatted message containing the sender's name. The sender's name is accurately parsed from a received pre-formatted message and is stored in a database. Upon receiving farther messages from the sender, a database lookup is performed to retrieve the previously stored sender's name and an auto-reply message can be personalized using the retrieved user's name. One problem with this approach is that it is not practical to require a sender to send a pre-formatted message to potential recipients in order to have accurately personalized auto-reply messages.
There is a need for improved auto-reply systems and methods.
Similar numerals may have been used throughout the figures to represent similar components.